Jordan Peele Reportedly in Talks for ‘Candyman’ Remake
Jordan Peele is understandably in high demand after making his feature directing debut with last year’s phenomenal Get Out. While the TV fave-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has no shortage of new projects in the works — including another horror film and a Twilight Zone revival — he may be looking to add one more horror film to his plate, and it’s a pretty damn significant one at that.
Bloody-Disgusting reports that Peele is currently in talks to produce a remake of the 1992 film Candyman via his Monkeypaw Productions banner. It’s unclear if Peele is also looking to direct the remake of the classic horror-romance film helmed by Bernard Rose, but the social commentary element of the original would certainly make it an excellent addition to Peele’s filmography regardless.
Starring Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen, Candyman is based on the Clive Barker short story “The Forbidden,” and centers on the eponymous urban boogeyman — a vengeful spirit with a hook for a hand who stalks the dilapidated Cabrini-Green housing development in Chicago, and who appears when his name is uttered three times in a mirror. In life, the Candyman was a talented artist and the son of a slave-turned-businessman who fell in love and fathered a child with a white woman in the late 19th century. Enraged by the coupling, his lover’s father set a lynch mob on the Candyman; his hand was severed and he was covered in honey, which attracted a swarm of bees that stung him to death.
Madsen played a graduate student researching a thesis on urban legends — she also happens to closely resemble Candyman’s lost love. Candyman has never quite been given its due, particularly as a socially-conscious horror thriller that pre-dates Peele’s own Get Out. But in the wake of Peele’s success, a few older horror films that mined the black American experience for heightened terror have been reevaluated, including Candyman and Tales From the Hood.
Peele is fairly busy at the moment, working on a small-screen adaptation of Lovecraft Country for HBO, as well as a Twilight Zone revival for CBS, and directing a new horror film titled Us — that film is set to hit theaters in 2019. But even if he’s only able to produce a Candyman remake, I’m still pretty stoked about the prospect of a more contemporary take on that underrated classic.